Shot Breakdown : Bhuna Bhutta

Food photography is becoming very popular thanks to mobile phones. Even the rise in keeping fit has pushed people to shoot food & showcase it online. Today I’ll show you how I shot, bhuna bhutta(Roasted Corn). Roasted Corn is a must have during monsoons. It can be had at roadside in India. Its healthy as well as tasty at the same time. The masala & lemon squeezed make it absolutely mouth-watering.

To begin with, I always have a rough sketch in my mind about the final shot. I start with a rough scribble on a paper.

Shooting:

As I was about to shoot, one of my speed-light failed. It refused to fire. To accommodate this hurdle, I had to modify my shooting. Luckily I had put my tabletop in front of the window so I was spared. Else I would have had to move all the setup all the way near the window. Now, the light streaming from the window acted as my back-light for the shot. I had my sole speed-light fire at 1/32 from camera right.

The failure of one flash meant using the ambient light for background & so I had my shutter all the way open for two seconds. Aperture was set to f/4 at ISO 100. The camera obviously on a tripod. To create the light fall-off on in later half of the photograph, I stood between the light(umbrella) so that it hit only the corn in the foreground. Another reason to do this was to make the steam more visible.

To the left of the corn in foreground, I placed a small beauty mirror to reflect some light back into the lemons & the foreground corn. Also a slight light blocker(black box) was placed to camera right out of the frame to reduce the light falling in front of the foreground corn. The idea behind this was to create a slight vignette.

Post-Processing:

As always, I shoot RAW to extract maximum details from the file. My program for processing was RawTherapee on Linux. The Exposure was boosted by + 0.40, Highlight Recovery Amount to 42 , Vibrance to 3 & I added + 6 for saturation. Sharpened the edges slightly & set the white balance to Day-Light preset in Raw Therapee. That was all the post processing I did.

2 Comments:

Gaurav… this is superb! I absolutely love everything about this shot. It may well have been a blessing that the flash conked out on you. The colors, the steam, the texture, the composition… it all seems so right. And your depth of field is spot on!

BTW… did you get to see the broadcast on Creative Live of Andrew Scrivani? He did a great job. Lots to learn!